“... Her steps went from the studio to the library and back again, to the bedroom, to the front hall.‘Tell me what you’re looking for.’‘Oh, some papers. A letter. It’s not important.’ Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä (c.1960) Jansson is best known for work very different from this. Her first Moomin book, The Moomins and the Great ...”

“... definitions and differences in sense. The stories of these volunteers form the backbone of Sarah Ogilvie’s book.Murray edited the OED from his grandly named ‘Scriptorium’, which was in fact a large corrugated iron shed, built first in the grounds of Mill Hill School, where he taught, and then in his garden at 78 Banbury Road. He began working on ...”

“... continuity or betrayed love, like the plots of 19th-century novels. The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall is said to be the ghost of Dorothy Walpole, Horace’s aunt, who after an affair was locked away by her jealous husband until her death (she probably died of smallpox). The ‘grey lady’ of Chillingham Castle is the restless spirit of Lady Berkeley, whose ...”

“... Manchester to see Bowie as Ziggy Stardust in 1972, and the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1976. The wretched economic state of Manchester in the late 1970s might even have helped the music scene: there were rehearsal rooms in old warehouses, recording studios in former mills. Curtis had a job for a while as a sales assistant at Rare Records, a ...”

“... scorn. Thus, when the headless chicken stuff was going on, or when the Tories wrapped the Albert Hall in a blue ribbon, it was hard not to hope that our disdainful visitor was spending the day somewhere else. But where? On every side, there seems to be some Toytown farce in progress. What, for instance, would Gore make of Christine Hamilton? What would he ...”

“... Travelling to Paris recently, I was surprised to see advertisements for ‘Joséphine Baker, Music-hall et paillettes’, an exhibition at the Espace Drouot-Montaigne commemorating the 75th anniversary of her electrifying Paris debut and the 25th anniversary of her death. With its pictures of Baker costumed and nude (and often both at the same time), with some fantastic outfits she actually wore and film of her dancing on stage, with snapshots of her among friends and admirers, the show recaptures the self-knowingly playful acrobatics and the heart-stopping clothed elegance of this unthreatening sexual being, a femme vitale but not fatale ...”

“... of the Middle Ages, idealised by the Victorians in scenes of ‘Merry Christmas in the Baron’s Hall’, was in reality abandoned as soon as it was possible to heat and light more rooms. At every level of society it seems there was a desire for increased privacy and households divided, with family, servants, guests of varying degrees of ...”

“... not falling in line. ‘To the Bernie or Bust people, you’re being ridiculous,’ the comedian Sarah Silverman, a chipper Sanders advocate throughout the primaries, said on Monday night. Earlier in the day Sanders had been booed at a rally of his own supporters for telling them to vote for Clinton. In a line that Sanders supporters took to be addressed to ...”

“... shattering and glassy, all daggers and plans, while the woman in the wheelchair across the hall from my father’s room in the nursing home struggled all day to untangle an invisible ball of string, or some other endlessly tangled thing. Kasischke’s people are breakable or broken, tangled up with one another, unable to stand alone. Any page of Where ...”

“... William Cowling, fails to become a terrorist, since he is too frightened, but his girlfriend, Sarah Strouch, passes the test and, by 1980, she is saying: ‘Terrorism is a state of mind, but nobody gets terrified anymore.’ Some two hundred pages later, she is saying much the same thing (this is a repetitive book), though she is no longer a terrorist ...”

“... effect of which is to leave an overriding impression of eccentricity and bad temper. We meet Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, lamenting her ‘misfortune to suffer very great mischiefs from the assistance of architects’; Sir John Cope, of Bramshill, whose ‘apartments are so vastly spacious that one generally sees Sir John toward the winter put on his ...”

“... most famous misapprehension – that Oscar dragged up to play the title role in Salome. ‘Sarah Bernhardt thinks she knows better than I do how to play Salome,’ purrs Fry’s Wilde, rehearsing the late 19th-century belief that sodomites were phenotypically male and psychologically female, and therefore buggers for a sequinned frock. The most brazen ...”

“... and generally treat women as victims or victims-in-waiting. A further addition to this gendered hall of mirrors is that, as Rivera Garza points out to the detective, ‘la víctima is always feminine,’ even if the bodies being sent to the morgue are male. ‘This word will castrate them over and over again.’The detective studies the work of Marina ...”

“... I was a student only at University College London. After Oxford, Peter Bunting met my mother, Sarah, and came to Durham University to train for the priesthood. It was after his ordination that he became a lecturer in theology at the university. The Buntings rented a pretty house near the cathedral. I never lived in it, but I know it well. It has four ...”

“... elaborate table silver for granted, undergraduates at my own college regularly drinking beer in Hall from 17th and 18th-century silver tankards. The spoons, though, I knew were in a different class and indeed they had to be deposited in the bank between visits. Bruce enjoyed food and was quite funny and snobbish about it. Dining once with him at the ...”